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In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances into a narrative that is impossible to put down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.

“Diamond’s most influential gift may be his ability to write about geopolitical and environmental systems in ways that don’t just educate and provoke, but entertain.” -The Seattle Times

“Extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in its ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past.” -The New York Times Book Review

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. He has published more than two hundred articles and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Look out for Jared Diamond's latest book, The World Until Yesterday, coming from Viking in January 2013.

List of Maps

p. xiii

Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms

p. 1

Two farms

Collapses, past and present

Vanished Edens?

A five-point framework

Businesses and the environment

The comparative method

Plan of the book

Modern Montana

p. 25

Under Montana's Big Sky

p. 27

Stan Falkow's story

Montana and me

Why begin with Montana?

Montana's economic history

Mining

Forests

Soil

Water

Native and non-native species

Differing visions

Attitudes towards regulation

Rick Laible's story

Chip Pigman's story

Tim Huls's story

John Cooks story

Montana, model of the world

Past Societies

p. 77

Twilight at Easter

p. 79

The quarry's mysteries

Easter's geography and history

People and food

Chiefs, clans, and commoners

Platforms and statues

Carving, transporting, erecting

The vanished forest

Consequences for society

Europeans and explanations

Why was Easter fragile?

Easter as metaphor

The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands

p. 120

Pitcairn before the Bounty

Three dissimilar islands

Trade

The movie's ending

The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors

p. 136

Desert farmers

Tree rings

Agricultural strategies

Chaco's problems and packrats

Regional integration

Chaco's decline and end

Chaco's message

The Maya Collapses

p. 157

Mysteries of lost cities

The Maya environment

Maya agriculture

Maya history

Copán

Complexities of collapses

Wars and droughts

Collapse in the southern lowlands

The Maya message

The Viking Prelude and Fugues

p. 178

Experiments in the Atlantic

The Viking explosion

Autocatalysis

Viking agriculture

Iron

Viking chiefs

Viking religion

Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes

Iceland's environment

Iceland's history

Iceland in context

Vinland

Norse Greenland's Flowering

p. 211

Europe's outpost

Greenland's climate today

Climate in the past

Native plants and animals

Norse settlement

Farming

Hunting and fishing

An integrated economy

Society

Trade with Europe

Self-image

Norse Greenland's End

p. 248

Introduction to the end

Deforestation

Soil and turf damage

The Inuit's predecessors

Inuit subsistence

Inuit/Norse relations

The end

Ultimate causes of the end

Opposite Paths to Success

p. 277

Bottom up, top down

New Guinea highlands

Tikopia

Tokugawa problems

Tokugawa solutions

Why Japan succeeded

Other successes

Modern Societies

p. 309

Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide

p. 311

A dilemma

Events in Rwanda

More than ethnic hatred

Buildup in Kanama

Explosion in Kanama

Why it happened

One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti

p. 329

Differences

Histories

Causes of divergence

Dominican environmental impacts

Balaguer

The Dominican environment today

The future

China, Lurching Giant

p. 358

China's significance

Background

Air, water, soil

Habitat, species, megaprojects

Consequences

Connections

The future

ôMiningö Australia

p. 378

Australia's significance

Soils

Water

Distance

Early history

Imported values

Trade and immigration

Land degradation

Other environmental problems

Signs of hope and change

Practical Lessons

p. 417

Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

p. 419

Road map for success

Failure to anticipate

Failure to perceive

Rational bad behavior

Disastrous values

Other irrational failures

Unsuccessful solutions

Signs of hope

Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes